OpenAI is targeting AI-powered hardware in a big way. The AI tech company is purchasing io, an AI device startup, for nearly $6.5 billion. The startup was co-founded by veteran Apple designer Jony Ive, who left the company to form a design outfit, LoveFrom, in 2019. It is OpenAI’s priciest acquisition yet.
Bloomberg reports that the deal is an “all-stock deal,” and will provide OpenAI a pathway from being exclusively a software company to making hardware. Alongside acquiring the io startup itself, OpenAI will bring Ive and other former Apple designers into the fold. OpenAI will add around 55 hardware engineers to its team when the deal closes this summer, pending the standard regulatory approvals.
“I have a growing sense that everything I’ve learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment,” Ive said in a joint interview conducted alongside OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman. “It’s a relationship and a way of working together that I think is going to yield products and products and products.”
Ive describes Altman as a “rare visionary.” For his part, Altman says he thinks the late Steve Jobs, who considered Ive his “spiritual partner,” would be “damn proud” of Ive joining OpenAI.
Technically, Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom, will remain independent, although Ive — and LoveFrom — will take over all design for OpenAI, including its software.
Ive co-founded io last year alongside fellow Apple alumni Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey, and Tang Tan. Hankey took over Ive’s role at Apple in 2019 and remained there until 2023. Tan led Apple’s iPhone and Watch design until 2024. Cannon worked at Apple until departing to co-create email app Mailbox, which Dropbox later acquired. It’s a powerful group with a rich history of software and hardware design success.
“We gathered together the best hardware and software engineers, the best technologists, physicists, scientists, researchers and experts in product development and manufacturing. Many of us have worked closely for decades. The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco,” Ive and Altman said today in a joint statement.
As part of the massive acquisition, OpenAI is paying io $5 billion in equity. The remaining balance is covered by a deal last year when OpenAI acquired a 23% stake in io. At that time, OpenAI’s startup fund also reportedly invested in Ive’s own company.
“People have an appetite for something new, which is a reflection on a sort of an unease with where we currently are,” Ive said.
AI devices have so far been primarily a flop, including the Humane AI pin that launched to dreadful reviews last year and was officially killed off earlier this year. Ive called the Humane AI pin and odd Rabbit R1 personal AI assistant devices “very poor” in an interview with Bloomberg.
Atlman, Ive, and the rest of the team are developing devices now and they expect the first ones to arrive in 2026.
“It will be worth the wait,” Altman promises. “It’s a crazy, ambitious thing to make.”
Image credits: OpenAI. Featured portrait by Craig McDean
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